Internet
Internet is a global network of computers and computers networks (the “Net”). The Internet connects computers that use a variety of different operating systems or languages, including UNIX, DOS, Windows, Macintosh, and others. To facilitate and allow the communication among these various systems and languages, the Internet uses a language referred to as TCP/IP (“Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol”). TCP/IP protocol supports three basic applications on the Internet:                transmitting and receiving electronic mail (e-mail),        logging into remote computers (the “Telnet”), and        transferring files and programs from one computer to another (“FTP” or “File Transfer Protocol”).World Wide Web        
With the increasing size and complexity of the Internet, tools have been developed to help find information on the network, often called navigators or navigation systems. Navigation systems that have been developed include standards such as Archie, Gopher and WAIS. The World Wide Web (“WWW” or “the Web”) is a recent superior navigation system. The Web is:                an Internet-based navigation system,        an information distribution and management system for the Internet, and        a dynamic format for communicating on the Web.        
The Web seamlessly, for the user, integrates different formats of information, including still images, text, audio and video. A user on the Web using a graphical user interface (“GUI”, pronounced “gooey”) may transparently communicate with different host computers on the system, access different system applications (including FTP and Telnet), and select different information formats for files and documents including, for example, text, sound and graphics.
Hypermedia
The Web uses hypertext and hypermedia. Hypertext is a subset of hypermedia and refers to computer-based “documents” in which readers move from one place to another in a document, or to another document, in a non-linear manner. To do this, the Web uses a client-server architecture. The Web servers enable the user to access hypertext and hypermedia information through the Web and the user's computer. (The user's computer is referred to as a client computer of the Web server computers.) The clients send requests to the Web servers, which react, search and respond. The Web allows client application software to request and receive hypermedia documents (including formatted text, audio, video and graphics) with hypertext link capabilities to other hypermedia documents, from a Web file server. The Web, then, can be viewed as a collection of document files residing on Web host computers that are interconnected by hyperlinks using networking protocols, forming a virtual “web” that spans the Internet.
Uniform R Source Locators
A resource of the Internet is unambiguously identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which is a pointer to a particular resource at a particular location. A URL specifies the protocol used to access a server (e.g. HTTP, FTP,. . . ), the name of the server, and the location of a file on that server.
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
Each Web page that appears on clients of the Web may appear as a complex document that integrates, for example, text, images, sounds and animation. Each such page may also contain hyperlinks to other Web documents so that a user at a client computer using a mouse may click on icons and may activate hyperlink jumps to a new page (which is a graphical representation of another document file) on the same or a different Web server.
A Web server is a software program on a Web host computer that answers requests from Web clients, typically over the Internet. All Web servers use a language or protocol to communicate with Web clients which is called Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (“HTTP”). All types of data can be exchanged among Web servers and clients using this protocol, including Hyper Text Mark-up Language (“HTML”), graphics, sound and video. HTML describes the layout, contents and hyperlinks of the documents and pages. Web clients when browsing:                convert user specified commands into HTTP GET requests,        connect to the appropriate Web server to get information, and        wait for a response. The response from the server can be the requested document or an error message.        
After the document or an error message is returned, the connection between the Web client and the Web server is closed.
The first version of HTTP is stateless, meaning that there is no continuous connection between each client and each server in the initial protocol. The Web client using HTTP receives a response as HTML data or other data. This description applies to version 1.0 of HTTP protocol, while the new version breaks this barrier of stateless protocol by keeping the connection between the server and client alive under certain conditions.
Browser
After receipt, the Web client formats and presents the data or activates an ancillary application such as a sound player to present the data. To do this, the server or the client determines the various types of data received. The Web Client is also referred to as the Web Browser, since it in fact browses documents retrieved from the Web Server.
Search for Information
Today, the search of information in the World Wide Web (also called the “Web”) is mostly based on alphabetic queries, comprising one or several search terms or keywords, and on services of Web search tools (i.e.: Lycos, Yahoo, Altavista, Netscape, Web Crawler, etc.). Alphabetic queries normally retrieve very large lists composed of hundreds or even thousands of URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) that match the query terms. Because more and more information is placed on the Web, users are faced with the growing problem of searching, identifying and selecting a rich, updated and useful information among an enormous amount of information, most of the time irrelevant for the intended purposes. This phenomena is very well summarized in the following comment:    “We have all heard of the perils of information overload. In contrast with “Internet addiction,” information overload wreaks more subtle effects, creating a sense of pervasive angst or apathy in this frenetic Cyber Age. As more and more information becomes available in ever more intricate forms on the Net, the problem promises only to become worse, particularly as it is so difficult to distinguish good, reliable information from the false or outdated variety.”—Marguerite Holloway—“Labeling the Web”, by Marguerite Holloway, IBM Research Magazine, Vol. 35, No. 3, 1997.
Therefore, there is a real and urgent need to improve the methods for searching and selecting information from the Web. Many researchers are adapting the technology to make Web searches much more selective and effective than they are now. A widely accepted approach today consists of attaching labels and meta data to documents on the Web. It is an attempt to make possible the separation of the cyberwheat from the chaff.
Geographic Information Systems
A lot of people have a real need to be immediately and easily informed about their environment. People need to have more and more information concerning particular places or type of places, buildings or service points located on rural or urban areas.
Today, there is a common requirement to develop better systems to enable people to identify and locate resources or services without any need of doing complex alphabetic queries that normally require preliminary knowledge about the subject that is searched (names of locations, addresses, relative distances, idioms, geographic positions, etc.). This need has been identified a long time ago by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) providers, cartographic information providers and most of the Web information providers (e.g.: Netscape Local Channel on http://www.netscape.com/local/index.html). Those institutions and many other (e.g.: travel agencies, government agencies, local authorities, etc.) today provide geographic and cartographic information in the Web by means of several services that enable the user to access, browse or download many different types of digitized maps for practically all regions of the world.
WebGIS
A much recent attention has been focused on the development of GIS functions on the Internet, Worldwide Web, and private Intranets. The WebGIS (abbreviation used to call the GIS applications on the Web) has the potential to make distributed geographic information (DGI) available to a very large worldwide audience. Internet users can access GIS applications from their Browsers without purchasing proprietary GIS software. Today the WebGIS makes it possible to add GIS functionality to a wide range of network-based applications in business, government, and education. Many of these applications run on Intranets within business companies and government agencies as a means of distributing and using geospatial data.
Many experiments are now underway in WebGIS and related map server applications for interactive cartography. One of the important areas of innovation involves “pay-for-use” mapping and GIS services. The challenge of WebGIS is to create software systems that are platform independent and able run on open TCP/IP networks (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol networks), that means on any computer capable of connecting to the Internet (or any TCP/IP network) and running a Web Browser. Many strategies are employed to add GIS functions to the Web:                Server-side strategies allow users (Web clients) to submit requests for data and analysis to a Web server. The Web server processes the requests and returns data or a solution to the remote Web client.        Client-side strategies allow users to perform some data manipulation and analysis locally on their own workstation.        Server and client processes can be combined in hybrid strategies for optimizing performance and for meeting special user needs.        
Common drawbacks are shared by almost all current GIS services present on the Web. The cartographic or geographic information provided by modern WebGIS or WebMAPPING systems:                is proprietary. The information is centrally owned, administered, actualized and distributed by some individual authority or information provider.        is static. It is not possible, directly from the maps, to link and get access to the information associated to the different locations represented on the maps.        is specialized and limited to certain types of data selected by the information provider (e.g. Fodor's restaurant index on http://www.fodors.com/ri.cgi, Fodor's hotel index on http://www.fodors.com/hi.cgi).Note: The expression “static information” means that maps provided on the Web are simple scanned images (named also “rasted” images, like a simple GIF or TIF file). The information cannot be panned, zoomed or translated. The information is simply limited to “what you see”.        
By contrast, the expression “dynamic information” can be used with GIS systems using “vector” maps, where additional information can be extracted by means of advanced functions such as area, distance, gravity center . . . , where links to other maps can be created . . .
The following comments can be applied to most WebGIS services:    “Even good map[s] . . . are but approximations of what is out there.”—Barry Lopez—“Arctic dreams”, by Barry Holstun Lopez, 1945; Scribner, N. Y., 1986, ISBN: 0684185784    “Ultimately maps . . . gain their power and usefulness from making connections and enabling unanticipated connections.”—David Turnbull—“Maps are Territories, Science is an Atlas”, by David Turnbull, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993    “All maps begin to lose their accuracy as soon as they are printed.”—Gregory C. Staple—“Notes on Mapping the Net: From Tribal Space to Corporate Space”, by Gregory C. Staple, TeleGeography Inc, 1995Specialized, Static and Proprietary Maps
Proprietary, static and specialized maps in general provide a limited amount of information and in many instances they lack the information that the user is interested in knowing. The design, content richness, maintenance, scale or resolution are limited most of the time for cost reasons. Frequently, proprietary maps are outdated, and they do not contain the required, updated and useful information. Out of very limited geometric operations (translate, rotate, pan, zoom), most of them lack powerful advanced tools to modify the information (the views) shown or to increase the information content (the view) of the map to reflect the geographic distribution of all possible kinds of selectable types of locations, establishments or service points (e.g.: locations of restaurants, pharmacies, parking, police stations, hospitals, historic monuments, bakeries, pubs, etc.).
Alphabetic Queries
On the other side, today, most methods of searching geographic information on the Web require from the user, as a preliminary step, the launch of one or a plurality of alphabetic queries (standard search tools are available on the Web) to retrieve the list of URLs that match the query. An alphabetic query requires:    1. to know in advance the URL or the name, address or any other specific reference concerning the location, or alternatively    2. to make a generic search by means of some generic geographic terms or generic search names (like city name, street name, county name, business name). The problem is then to identify the location sometimes from a very large list of documents.
Once a location is selected, some services on the Web (e.g.: Netscape Local Channel) enable to view over a digital map of the area, the position of the location.
From the above cited considerations, today there is a real need of a new system that could allow people to identify, locate and become fully informed about all kinds of resources or services without:
                having a preliminary knowledge of the geography and locations names to select, classify or discard (e.g. without knowing in advance city street names or distances to access a particular service or location).        doing complex queries (that normally require to have a preliminary knowledge about the subject to ask for),        being dependent on the quantity or the quality of the information provided by servers.New Generation of Geographic Information System        
More specifically, there is a need for a new GIS system for automatically searching, retrieving and mapping “from all the information available on the Web” the geographic distribution of places, located inside regions of different sizes around any chosen reference point of the world, where selectable types of resources are located or certain types of services are provided (hospitals, bus terminals, historical places, oil-posts, restaurants, hotels, etc.). As an additional desirable feature of a system like this, the user must be able to select any one of the automatically mapped locations and to browse the information retrieved from the Web for this point, without any resort to services of specialized geographic information systems or mapping systems providers.
Simplicity of use of the new system must be such that all that is requested from the user's side is limited to a simple questions like: “What I am looking for?” (i.e.: hospitals, bus terminals, water springs, restaurants, etc.). In some other cases the user must be able to restrict the search to a geographic region. The user must be able to point over a digital map or to specify coordinates (longitude/latitude) of a central reference point of the world, even distant from his actual position to execute the search in a region around this point.
The new generation of WebGIS must provide always updated and really dynamic maps showing the locations of all types of topics around the world. Also, maps must automatically resolve all kinds of questions by mapping the spatial distribution of locations with specific resources. These maps must make possible the access to all the available information concerning these locations from everywhere in the world. Finally, maps must always be accurate. For that they must be updated every day by the thousands of information providers on the Web throughout the world.